Investigation

Time flies when you're having fun. I bought the equipment to measure headphones for Hi-Fi News as long ago as May 2007, since when I've tested around 115 different models for the magazine. These have included circumaural (over-ear) designs, supra-aural (on-ear) and insert, active and passive, priced from under £100 to almost £5000.

Putting a hi-fi system together can be one of life's great pleasures, but it can also become expensive and complicated if not done with care. Vintage hi-fi enthusiasts have three basic options. The first is to assemble a 'one make' system, normally using a combination suggested in an old catalogue as a starting point. Another is to assemble a mixed system of vintage components. The third is to add some vintage components to a modern set-up, or complete a vintage system using modern products.

When I first heard a demonstration of stereo records, given at a local department store all those years ago, I came away thinking I'd heard mostly distracting surface noise. If this was 'high fidelity' I'd stick with my old Pye Black Box! But soon, of course, I was on the upgrade path avidly taking up recommendations in Hi-Fi News and Audio Record Review magazines, and reading Thomas Heinitz's regular columns in the now defunct Records & Recording.

History books tell you that jazz first crossed the Atlantic with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who made their first records in 1917 and came to England in 1919. And that it was the coincidentally-named orchestra leader and composer James Reese Europe who first brought genuine African-American music to French ears with his black US army band in 1918.

Jean-Michel Jarre likes what he hears. And it's not only the sound of his new album, which he is playing to an eager audience packed into the Audiofast room at the Audio Video show in Warsaw, but the very audio system on which it is being played.

'My new album is a good test for loudspeakers,' he says smiling, 'because I know that it has lots of different frequencies. This means that it's hard to hear the whole effect on some hi-fi systems, but this one is highly capable.'

If, in 1999, you were told that vinyl would enjoy such a massive revival that in 2019 HMV would be opening a flagship store in Birmingham stocking 25,000 records, and that turntables and LPs would appear in mainstream TV ads for watches and life insurance, you'd have laughed in disbelief. But then you would have paused, because both records and turntables were never entirely out of production.

There isn't much in a modern hi-fi system that would be familiar to the great 19th century English physicist Michael Faraday. But a time-travelling Faraday – bemused by radio frequency communication, lasers and sound reproduction in general – would find something reassuringly familiar in the transformer. For it was he who first demonstrated that electromagnetic induction can be used to link one electrical circuit to another.